Despite insisting two months ago that it would not work, U.S. Rep. Phil Roe said Thursday he voted with Republican House members to defund portions of the Affordable Care Act, which contributed to a 16-day government shutdown at an estimated $24 bill ion loss to the U.S. economy, knowing that the measure was likely to fail.

“I feel like, people say the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land, but that doesn’t mean we should just accept it and let it keep us away from the goal of passing a balanced budget,” the three-term congressman said during a conference call Thursday with members of the media.

But a month before his Sept. 20 vote to strip funding for the three-year-old health care law from a continuing resolution passed by the Senate, Roe told the Johnson City Press that, because part of the law, commonly referred to as Obamacare, is funded by mandatory spending, any efforts to defund it would simply not work.

“It’s nigh on impossible,” he said during the Aug. 14 meeting with the newspaper’s editorial board. “It’s an easy talking point, but it’s not that simple, because of the way the law was written. We’d have to vote to change the entire law.”